Vanessa Bush vies for the attention of a group of schoolchildren Tuesday
afternoon so she can explain the rules of a game she's created.

"Each of you will roll a die," Bush tells the students. "The first one to yell
out the product of the numbers ... gets to hop as many squares as the dice add
up to."

But Bush isn't a math teacher. She is one of 11 Arizona State University
students who volunteer twice a week to tutor children from Mesa's Eisenhower
Elementary School at the nearby Salvation Army center.

The three groups have worked together since 1999 to provide extra help to
students after school.

"It's kind of a neat system that we've developed over the years," said Major
Brian Jones, who heads the Mesa Citadel Corps of the Salvation Army.

After arriving and having a snack, students are divided into groups and spend
half their time playing a group game. They spend the rest of the afternoon
getting one-on-one attention from an ASU student tutor.

Ball said the ASU student tutors are also learning from the tutoring program.
They receive course credit for their work, which includes writing essays,
discussing them with classmates and drawing up individual lesson plans for each
of the two students they tutor.

Stephanie Pecchia, a psychology senior, said she joined the program because a
scholarship required her to do volunteer work.

"It takes a lot of patience, but it definitely pays off," she said.

On Tuesday, Pecchia had a student play with finger paint to learn about primary
and secondary colors. And she said she once assigned numbers to the colored dots
of the game of Twister to encourage a student to complete math problems
mentally.

"Because your hands are on the floor, you can't use your fingers to count it
out," she said.

Like Pecchia, Ball said a majority of the tutors are majoring in a field other
than education.

Senior Brent Ulrich said his Spanish coursework has been useful since he's
working with a student who is more fluent in Spanish than English.

"A majority of the time, I'm actually speaking to him in Spanish," Ulrich said.

Ulrich, who will graduate next month, said he was looking for something to do
outside the classroom in his last semester at ASU.

"You're helping these kids, and you can actually see this," he said. "Any other
class you go to, they just lecture at you. Here you get to see the results of
your work."

Teachers at Eisenhower are also seeing the results, both academically and
socially, said Assistant Principal Yvonne Colland, who has 12 to 15 students on
the program's waiting list.

"Usually I hear, 'Do you have any more openings?' " she said.

About Season for Sharing

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